Sava by the Clotheslines

I am really excited about our upcoming trip to my homeland: two weeks back in Northern California in the beginning of July!!! I am bringing some boards out, to start painting my new Americana series (slated for a show next May for the Arts Council of the Valley).  We are going to be camping up north with friends near a river, and then spending a week at the family cabin in the Sierra Nevadas....

This cabin is the loose foci of the new body of work  that I have been dreaming about doing for about three years. It is going to be source from family photographs from my early childhood spent at the lake, and so I hope to find inspiration in the revisiting of the smell and feel of the crisp mountain air, and the lake gently lapping at the shore. I would like to get some of the pieces at least started there.....

But hell, in the meantime... some Virginia is creeping in. I can't seem to wait to get started on this new series. I am getting inspired by images of my daughter, Sava Talulah, playing amongst the gardens and front yards (littered with bunny statuary and bird fountains and decaying front porch couches....ahhh, a different vision of American, but potent and compelling all the same). Here is what is perhaps to be the first painting in the series..... Sava by the Clotheslines...still in progress-  so much to dial in!   But...

I love it.

The other cool thing is that I was looking at the top photo on the computer (the up close painted face), with Sava in my arms, and I pointed to the screen and asked her, "Sava, who is that?" and she looked at it and said  "Saba!".    Which is saying something... I think. For her to recognize herself in blobs of collected paint.

 

Maybe this series is going to be as much of an examination of childhood.... in particular, the mirrored and particular upbringings of myself and my daughter. What has changed... what stays constant? Are we able to experience an Americana that is not utterly personal?